Living Locally selects entries from a daily journal written over five years about rural life in and around a farming valley in Tipperary, to the north of the Knockmealdown Mountains. With needle-sharp observation and in plain words, Van Horn makes remarkable what might otherwise have gone unrecorded: the familiarity of neighbours, of animals and of weather, the regularity of the patterns of transaction on roads and in nearby villages and towns, and, from an outsider’s perspective, the unfamiliarity of speech and custom. What results is a human geography whose immediacy recalls earlier local and rural records and enquiries, such as the diary of Francis Kilvert in the Welsh Borders in the 1870s, or Cecil Torr’s recollections from his Dartmoor village, Small Talk at Wreyland. In common with these is a concern with both the colloquial and the vernacular, and the strangeness found in such a concentration of repetition and usage.

Foreword by Susan Howe.
With 33 double-sided drawings.

Beinecke Library, Yale University: “Erica Van Horn regularly draws the subject of her work directly from the fabric of her daily life, her domestic and artistic work, the simple household objects at hand, the day-to-day aspects of familiar relationships… Her attention to the ‘everyday’ is also an act of recording that which is most important to her; Van Horn creates work that serves as an aid to memory and acts as a hedge against the inevitable passing of one day to the next… and celebrates the significant but often unnoticed habits and customs of family and friendship, the exquisite qualities of home, the work of making art.”